London theatre reviews

Cricket and playwrights is a weirdly classic combination, with Beckett, Stoppard and Pinter the most famous amongst many vocal fans of the sport. Nobody has ever actually written a great play about it, though…

Everyone knows the story of ‘Swan Lake’. A princess turned into a swan, a wicked sorcerer, a chiselled prince coming to save her. It’s a wonder that the ancient story, and ancient 1877 choreography by Marius Petipa, is still beguiling audiences. But just like the most classic of fairy tales, the tale of the cursed princess remains a gesamtkunstwerk that will definitely pull on your heartstrings…

This fresh new musical romcom is a treat - not too sickly, but perfectly sweet. The tone is exactly what you’d expect from the title: offbeat, a little bit indie, knowing its quirks. And so’s the premise…

In a wedge shaped set, bright yellow as bile, a machine does its work. 

Writer-director Bijan Sheibani’s new short play is very well-observed: it feels like a fly-on-the-wall documentary of the blurry first few months of being a parent.

There’s been a frenzy of hype around Sam Grabiner’s debut play ‘Boys on the Verge of Tears’…

A ballad tells a story and writer Samuel Adamson starts his with a narrative misdirection: a woman is filmed playing a piano at St Pancras International and the footage goes viral, reuniting her with a man who professes still to love her…

‘Little fish, big fish/swimming in the water/come back here man/gimme my daughter’ hissed a demonic 25-year-old Polly Jean Harvey in her 1995 hit ‘Down By the Water’…

It feels like just yesterday that ‘millennial’ was synonymous with ‘young’. But in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins rancorous dark comedy, a group of late thirtysomething American friends marvel at how much they’ve all lived through…

Yes, the presence of soon-to-turn-85 stage and screen legend Ian McKellen tackling Shakespeare’s great character Sir John Falstaff is the big draw in ‘Player Kings’. But Robert Icke’s three hour-40-minute modern-dress take on the two ‘Henry IV’ plays does not pander to its star…